Being realistic and demanding the impossible

Abstract

The greatest artist does not have any concept Which a single piece of marble does not itself contain Within its excess, though only A hand that obeys the intellect can discover it. Michelangelo Buonarroti Fidelity to the facts in political theory is often associated with a conservative slant, or at least a tendency to prefer incremental reformism to radicalism. Political realism—both in its classical manifestations and its contemporary revival1—is frequently linked to that tendency. For instance, in recent works we read that realism can lead to a “collapsing of the space for serious challenges to major social and political institutions (Markell, 2010, p. 176), that “the closer political theorists are to politics the more their own judgment and frailties will be tested” (Philp, 2012, p. 646), and that “realism will inevitably tend to nudge us towards a greater acceptance of the status quo, towards more modesty in the change that we are prepared to propose or demand” (Finlayson, 2017, p. 271). In this article I resist those claims, and contribute to the project of reclaiming the radical potential of political realism (Brinn, 2019; Cross, 2019; Honig & Stears, 2011; McKean, 2016; McQueen, 2016; Prinz, 2016; Raekstad, 2016; Prinz & Rossi, 2017). I develop a form of realism as genealogy–both debunking and vindicatory–and show how it can be more radical than both ideal and nonideal approaches to normative political theory. I arrive at this conclusion by addressing two related, partly methodological and partly substantive challenges facing realism. The first challenge concerns the very possibility of a realist normative political theory: if characterizing realism by contrasting it with moralism means that political judgment is not to be derived from pre-political moral commitments, what other sources of political normativity are available? The second challenge is status quo bias: does realism's fidelity to the facts condemn it to some form of conservative complacency? I argue that there is an important sense in which realists can support radical and even unachievable political change—one can be realistic and demand the impossible, as the soixante-huitard slogan goes. To see how that may be the case one needs to characterize realism by contrasting it with both nonideal theory and utopianism (in a pejorative sense of the term, as I shall clarify). In a nutshell, realism differs from nonideal theory because it need not be concerned with feasibility constraints, and it differs from utopianism because it eschews plans of the perfect polity or for the correct course of political action. Utopianism, realism and nonideal theory are all technical terms, so my definitions will by necessity be stipulative, though, it is to be hoped, not overly controversial. With those distinctions in place it will become clear that moralism is at greater risk of status quo bias than realism because of its relative blindness to ideological bias. Whereas realism, I argue, is an approach grounded in our best social-scientific accounts of politics, but not in such a way as to jeopardize the transformative potential of our political imagination. The upshot is that, if we set aside the quasi-technocratic aspirations of a political theory geared to generate immediate policy guidance, realism (rather than nonideal theory) emerges as the best bet for those sympathetic to many of the concerns about fidelity to the facts of real politics raised in current methodological debates (e.g., Estlund, 2014, 2017; Freeden, 2012; Hamlin & Stemplowska, 2012; Horton, 2017; Miller, 2016; Mills, 2005; Rossi, 2016; Valentini, 2012; Wiens, 2012). That, however, this not true of all forms of realism. In fact, after briefly characterizing realism in the next section, I move on to distinguishing between ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism. I then show how each approach draws on different sources of normativity and, relatedly, exhibits fidelity to a different set of facts about politics. I associate ordorealism with the prioritization of peace and stability, contextual realism with practice-dependent norms, and radical realism with a form of ideology critique. I then contrast realism with nonideal theory and discuss utopianism and the prospects for a radical realism. I characterize a version of radical realism with a distinctive epistemic normativity, which has radical potential that surpasses what is found in moralist political theory and also opens a new option in the debate on the status of normativity in Marxism. That is because, while radical realism avoids potentially ideological moralizing, it can inform open-ended social critique as well as lend support to concrete forms of prefigurative politics. To be sure, that is not sufficient to establish the superiority of realism to moralism, and not even to identify the all-things-considered best form of realism. My aim here is more modest: I want to show that, pace some critics (Erman & Möller, 2015a; Estlund, 2017; Leader-Maynard & Worsnip, 2018; Scheuerman, 2013), contemporary realism is a distinctive and consistent position in normative political theory, and that at least one of its variants does not suffer from a status quo bias—rather, it is as radical as it gets. Moral philosophy sets the background for, and the boundaries of, political philosophy. What persons may and may not do to one another limits what they may do through the apparatus of a state, or do to establish such an apparatus. (Nozick, 1974, p. 6) While that approach remains prevalent in contemporary Anglo-American political philosophy, realists claim that no overarching principles that span personal morality and politics are plausible. That may appear to fly in the face of simple consistency requirements: if there are true overarching moral principles (“bring about the greatest good for the greatest number,” or “never lie,” say),—where “overarching” means that they apply to any agent regardless of whether the context of action is politics or not—then shouldn't we just apply them to our political predicament, in a categorical or even just pro tanto way? The realist contention is that moralists beg the question of whether there are any such principles spanning the personal and the political—a fraught distinction we will discuss in the next subsection—or at least whether they are good guides to political action or judgment. That is not to say that non-overarching principles are just role ethics principles for political office-holders (Estlund, 2017, p. 366), for non-overarching principles are not just a context-specific application of overarching principles. More precisely, non-overarching, properly political principles don't draw on the same sources of normativity as moral principles. That is why realists believe that there are no overarching principles. If such overarching moral principles existed, then at least a significant portion of normative political theory would be a branch of applied ethics. If realists can show that they can make normative political judgments that don't draw on overarching principles and so don't share the sources of normativity of moral principles, then they will have made room for their view. One may reply that the lack of overarching moral principles doesn't preclude the notion that politics should be governed by moral principles, albeit moral principles that apply only to the political domain (Estlund, 2017, p. 367). That is a point realists who are not overly concerned with semantics are ready to concede (Williams, 2005, p. 5). What matters is that realist normative standards—however one may wish to call them—are not inferred from overarching, pre-political values or principles.2 The main arguments in favor of the rejection of overarching moral principles, i.e., the realist thesis about the normative autonomy of the political, could be crudely summarized by this slogan: if morality could solve political problems, we wouldn't have politics. I want to distinguish between three argumentative strategies in support of this claim, each of which leads to a different strand of realism: ordorealism, contextual realism, and radical realism. Three caveats about that taxonomy are in order. First, my task here isn't to show how these arguments defeat moralism, but simply to articulate the positions realists may take. Second, those are Weberian ideal types; most worked out positions incorporate elements from more than one of the three approaches. Third, I make no consequential hermeneutical claims about any of the canonical figures I mention to fix ideas, nor about their reception. Ordorealism has a familiar Hobbesian starting point, which Bernard Williams calls ‘the first political question’: “the securing of order, protection, safety, trust, and the conditions of cooperation” (Williams, 2005, p. 3). The basic thought is that, left to their own devices, including their own ethical judgments, people conflict, with highly undesirable results—so much so that ethical judgment itself may be reduced to a dead letter. Morality or justice are not in themselves a way out of this problem but, as Hobbes saw, they may be instruments through which political power enables us to solve that problem. So we need a freestanding sphere of political normativity if there is to be scope for personal morality, let alone most other trappings of human sociality. Note how leaving (or not falling into) the state of nature is considered desirable not out of some moral commitment to the desirability of political association,3 but simply because it is a precondition for the enjoyment of most of what we happen to take to be valuable, morally or otherwise (Williams, 2005, p. 3). This is a modest point about the instrumental value of political association. As such it is an empirical claim, and one that probably wouldn't hold true in the few remaining small-scale stateless societies (Widerquist & McCall, 2015). But a certain contingency even of its basic claims is characteristic of the empiricist roots of this strand of realism. The contextual strategy's starting point can also be understood as beginning empirically, through an observation of the phenomenological difference between the political and the personal. One doesn't need to invoke Carl Schmitt to note that something is amiss in the thought that lying to my friends is bad for the same reasons that lying in a political campaign is bad, if indeed it is. This approach may remind us of Machiavelli's claims about the tensions between personal and political values and so of the unlikeliness of a unified source for both. Yet realists need not endorse the more radical and old-fashioned readings of Machiavelli, according to which there is no salient difference between legitimate authority and effective power. Indeed some realists elevate such a distinction to a foundational principle (Sagar, 2018). The important point is just that the normative standards that apply to the exercise of political power are different from those that apply to personal relationships. Here, however, one may worry that contextual realists have failed to learn the feminist lesson encapsulated in the slogan, “the personal is political.” To assuage that worry, one may distinguish the personal/political boundary from the public/private one. Many liberal theorists consider them to be equivalent, or in any case focus solely on the latter, as their main concern is to identify the appropriate sphere of legitimate state intervention. So they tend to accommodate feminist concerns by acknowledging that, while the public/private line may have been drawn in the wrong place, the distinction remains viable and important (Gavison, 1992). Liberal realists, qua liberals, will be unable to accommodate the radical position of feminists who reject the public/private distinction altogether (MacKinnon, 1989). But realists need not be liberals, and if they aren't they can focus on the personal/political line instead, which in turn may allow for kinship with quite radical feminist positions (Frazer, 2015). That is because the personal/political distinction is not about a narrow liberal concern with the limits of state action. When the slogan was coined in the 1960s, feminists wanted to point out that, even in movements uninterested in the state or antagonistic towards it, the sphere of appropriately political action was conceived too narrowly, often in ways that marginalized issues of concern to women (Finlayson, 2016, pp. 125–128). That is not to say that the line cannot be drawn. Rather, the slogan reminds us to look with suspicion at any established, ossified way of drawing the line between the personal and the political. The point about questioning the received wisdom about issues like the political/personal divide—critiquing them as ideology, if you will—leads to the third and final strategy at the realist's disposal, the radical one whose guiding thought is that “ethics is usually dead politics; the hand of a victor in a past conflict reaching out to extend its grip to the present and the future,” as Raymond Geuss puts it (2010, p. 42). Insofar as morality is influenced by political power, moral advocacy for political actions and institutions should be the object of critical suspicion—more so than most mainstream, ethics-first political theory allows. That point highlights a connection between the radical and ordorealist approaches. For ordorealists morality and justice are instrumenta regni. The radical approach shares that insight. However, on the ordorealist view the priority remains to establish order by whatever means necessary and so the insight is not problematized. The radical approach tries to establish criteria for making qualitative distinctions between the moral (and other) beliefs that support political authority. Different strands of realism assign different relative weights to stability and ideology, and resolve the trade-off accordingly. As I will show in a moment, the insistence on meeting the basic legitimation demand is ordorealist, the references to a form of legitimation specifically suited for modernity are contextual, and the litmus test for the admissibility of beliefs in legitimacy is radical. The basic legitimation demand exemplifies the ordorealist approach insofar as it requires the provision of order and stability, so relative success in meeting the demand becomes the basis of normative judgments. Importantly, though, the coercive provision of order is conceptually distinguishable from raw domination, which is suspended warfare rather than a political relationship (Hall, 2015)—all politics is coercive, but not all coercion is political. While it is possible to say of any regime whether it meets the basic legitimation demand, the notions of order and stability here can be filled in in context-dependent ways: what might have been acceptable politics in feudal Europe would not pass muster now. Politics versus raw domination is a conceptual distinction, but ordorealists can accommodate conceptual change. Yet a prudent attitude towards change prevails among realists who emphasize those concerns. So, simplifying somewhat, in the work of Matt Sleat (2013a) and Andrew Sabl (2011, 2017) we find defenses of relatively conservative versions of liberalism, with an emphasis on providing a stable outlet for the management of diversity social conflict while renouncing the neo-Kantian project of neutral arbitration. Contextual realism can be associated with a practice-dependent approach to the sources of normativity (Sangiovanni, 2008; Rossi, 2012). The rough idea is that normative political principles are grounded in an interpretation of the point and purpose of particular political practices. The contextual realist, then, constructs her normative standards by asking whether the point and purpose of a particular set of institutions is genuinely political (i.e., whether it addresses the right questions about the provision of order, etc.), and whether those institutions are suited to their purpose. In Williams's theory this is exemplified by the connection between modernity and liberalism: an analysis of the historical context yields an account of the most suitable regime. This is a different level of evaluation from that which a pure ordorealist approach would warrant. For it allows us to rank alternative legitimate regimes on the basis of their fitness for purpose. Robert Jubb's recent defense of non-intrinsic egalitarianism exemplifies this approach (Jubb, 2015). Crudely, on Jubb's view an egalitarian standard turns out to be required for legitimacy on the basis of a reading of what may be expected of political institutions under contemporary conditions. New realist work on the legitimacy and justice of the EU similarly draws on Williams-inspired practice dependence (Beetz, 2017). The radical approach, on the other hand, acquires its normativity by contesting what one may call legitimation stories. Williams's critical theory principle provides a good illustration. The distinction between necessary political coercion and raw domination partly depends on whether the exercise of political power makes sense to those over whom it is exercised (Williams, 2005, pp. 4–6), but this perception can be manipulated by ideology. For Williams this happens when a belief in the legitimacy of a coercive order is caused by the very power it supports and is in the interest of that power (Williams, 2002, pp. 230–234; 2005, p. 6; Sagar, 2018). One may not find that account of ideological distortion persuasive, but radical-minded realists must have one in order to make good the idea that there is more to legitimacy than a belief in it. And, importantly, the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable legitimation stories is not moral but epistemic: ideological legitimation stories just aren't what they purport to be, so epistemic caution requires us to disregard them, as we will see in 3.2 below (Prinz & Rossi, 2017).4 Recent realist work in this vein includes critiques of the ideology of Rawlsian political liberalism (Finlayson, 2015; Freyenhagen, 2011) as well as historically informed, genealogical critiques of specific policy proposals or normative commitments (Prinz & Rossi, forthcoming; Rossi, 2017; Rossi & Argenton, 2017; Rossi & Prinz, forthcoming). Charles Mills's influential critique of the ideological nature of mainstream political philosophy's methodology may also be read in this light (Mills, 2005). That thumbnail sketch of realism should go some way towards explaining why realism is distinct from nonideal theory, even though it is frequently lumped together with it by the many theorists who reduce it to an approach centered on “the concrete choices among limited alternatives made by agents with finite resources” (Markell, 2010, p. 176) or on the fact that “real world politics is characterized by noncompliance” (North, 2017, p. 1).5 Both realism and nonideal theory are about taking “the facts” more seriously than most contemporary anglophone political theory does, but here I will show that, at least for some variants of realism, we are talking about importantly different sorts of facts. And that has consequences for the level of radicalism available to each theoretical approach. Crudely, nonideal theory is a set of guidelines for how best to pursue our normative political ideals in the actual world. This can either be taken to point to a division of labour between ideal and nonideal theory, much as Rawls envisaged (Simmons, 2010), or to indicate a need to prioritize engagement with real-world political problems as opposed to imagining the ideal polity (Sen, 2006; Wiens, 2012)—either out of agnosticism about the ideal, or because one sees the ideal as an ideological distraction from concrete opportunities for social change (Mills, 2005). Let us bracket these debates. I just want to show that there is a consequential distinction between nonideal theory and realism. Whatever our account of nonideal theory, a class of facts is going to play a crucial role in it; namely, facts about feasibility constraints. On the division of labour model, given an ideal theory describing a desirable and yet (for the time being or indefinitely) unachievable political state of affairs, nonideal theory will tell us what is the best way to approximate the ideal, given what is feasible. If we reject the division of labour model and maintain that normative theories should directly rank political options against one another as opposed to against some ideal (Sen, 2006), then nonideal theory will consist of a balancing act between the values embodied in alternative feasible scenarios. Either way nonideal theory is a criterion or a set of criteria for the ranking of politically feasible states of affairs. Now recall the three realist strategies for generating non-moralistic political normativity. Facts will play a role in each strategy, but they don't have to be facts about feasibility for all types of realism. Though the lines in Table 1 ought to be decidedly blurry, the table offers a schematic representation of that point (Table 1). The third column shows the difference between realism(s) and nonideal theory. Roughly, we may say that the ties to the status quo become weaker as we descend through the rows. Only the top right box is bound to contain facts about feasibility: ordorealists will have to identify political solutions that can provide order in the actual world. This type of realism is indeed most often associated with the conservative or authoritarian figures in the canon: Schmitt, Oakeshott, perhaps Lenin. It also plays an important role in versions of contemporary liberal realism (Sabl, 2017; Sleat, 2012; Williams, 1997) that are less keen on or hopeful about progressive social change than mainstream liberal theory. Normative theorizing in that vein is tied to options reachable from the status quo. As we have seen that realism and nonideal theory cut across one another, we may say that, insofar as they have to take feasibility constraints into account, ordorealists are nonideal theorists of realism. The contextual realist will have scope for radical social criticism through a reinterpretation of the practices and institutions at hand (Walzer, 1993). A practice-dependent approach is by definition anchored to reality, but the extent to which that produces a status quo bias varies greatly depending on the details of the approach. There is in fact a growing literature addressing this issue (Erman & Möller, 2015c; Sangiovanni, 2008), so I cannot do justice to its complexity here. Suffice it to say that, even if critics on the left are correct that the most radical options are ruled out to practice-dependent theorists, there are plenty of transformative proposals informed by that approach. Many are not realist, but some adopt realist methodological commitments (e.g., Beetz, 2017; Dasandi & Erez, 2019; Jubb, 2015). Finally, the radical realist will be able to run the gamut from contemplative Adornian pessimism to anti-hegemonic transformative projects. This work will be informed by an understanding of how power relations shape beliefs in legitimacy, and so it will draw on the best social-scientific accounts of those dynamics, but that places no obvious limits on our ability to critique and our attempts to reconfigure those beliefs (Freyenhagen, 2013). At any rate, and crucially for our purposes, the radical realist has no need for feasibility constraints. That is not to say that all status quo bias comes from feasibility constraints, but arguably all status quo bias due to fidelity to the facts does. So (some) realists can demand the impossible. Realism is anchored in facts, but not necessarily marred by status quo bias. Does that mean that radical realists can prescribe anything that is metaphysically possible, with no regard to feasibility? G.A. Cohen and David Estlund tell us that it is permissible and even advisable to do so (Cohen, 2008; Estlund, 2011, 2014). It would be an odd result if radical realism found itself aligned with positions one may call arch-moralistic (or methodologically moralistic, in Estlund's parlance). My view is that realists can make prescriptions that do not take feasibility into account, but other limitations apply: realists’ attention to the complexities of political dynamics cautions against two forms of theoretical hubris, which we may call technocratic and ideological moralism.6 [W]e cannot describe, that is, picture, in the concrete, any state of society of which the world has had no experience. For into the reality of a society, even in its broader details, there enters a large element of contingency, of alogicality, of unreason, with which no general principles will furnish us. (Bax, 1891) By contrast, radical realism is empirically informed, and so while it can let the political imagination run free of feasibility constraints, it is wary of letting it go down the dark alleys of precise prescriptions that balance an unwieldy amount of variables. The realist can be politically ambitious and systematic, but must be theoretically modest enough to leave those details to politics: there are aspects of politics not amenable to philosophical domestication. The charge of ideological moralism is the realists’ way of turning the tables on their opponents. Realism's status quo bias is supposed to come from its reliance on facts. Moralists like Cohen and, to a lesser extent, Estlund suggest that the best guarantee for truly progressive thought comes from banishing facts from the justification of our normative principles: crudely, the less we rely on facts, the more we rely on moral judgments alone (Rossi, 2016). But where do these judgments—and the intuitions that underpin them—come from? To see a potential for bias there one doesn't have to agree completely with Sally Haslanger on the workings of ideology: “our meanings are not transparent to us: often ideology interferes with an understanding of the true workings of our conceptual framework and our language” (Haslanger, 2012, p. 383). Suffice it to observe that, as many philosophical and psychological studies show, our moral intuitions and system-justifying moral commitments must relate in some non-trivial way to our present practices, if only because, whatever else it may be, morality is one of the practices we are engaged in (Jost & Hunyady, 2005). In which case there is at least a debate to be had as to the relative merits of fact-induced as opposed to ideology-induced status quo bias. The two forms of moralistic theoretical hubris are pitfalls radical realism must avoid. But once they are ruled out, what room is left for radical normative theorizing? The answer I wish to outline here takes its cue from an ambiguity in the word “utopia”, which may be taken to mean “good place” (eutopia) or “no place” (outopia). The blueprint of the technocratic moralist and the aspiration to moral perfection of the ideological moralist are eutopian. Radical realism is outopian, in the sense that its normativity is negative: it just tells us that, given its diagnosis, the society we should aspire to is, for the time being, a non-place—though with the partial exceptions that we shall explore below. Now, even if there are no blueprints, on what basis can we make those normative assessments without drawing on pre-political moral commitments? Recall our discussion of the sources of normativity for the radical approach to realism: normative judgments follow from a critical appraisal of legitimation stories, and the appraisal is predicated on epistemic rather than moral considerations. If a legitimation story isn't what it purports to be, it becomes epistemically suspicious and so should be debunked, and the practices it supports should be disposed of. Conversely, a critical examination of other legitimation stories may vindicate the practices they support. Some would rather resort to notions of autonomy to ground those appraisals, and even Williams appeals to “the most basic sense of freedom,” which tells us that we should try to avoid being “in the power of another” to justify his critical theory principle, but it is important for a thoroughgoing realist to resist the siren call of even such minimal pre-political moral commitments (Williams, 2002, p. 231). Or rather, anyone using such commitments in normative political theory does so at the non-trivial risk of having them debunked at a later stage—for we should not employ pre-political moral commitments whose genealogy turns out to be tied up with the very political norms or institutions they are meant to justify. The rough idea behind that move can be expressed using the analogy of refereeing: it would be epistemically unwise to use an author as a referee for her own work. Likewise, if (say) it turns out that states had a central role in producing our current notion of private property, then it is (ceteris paribus) epistemically unwise to use the notion of property to assess the legitimacy of states.7 David Estlund invokes another analogy to express his skepticism of this sort of realist debunking: “arguments in criminal court are overwhelmingly self-serving, and often produced for that reason. This should alert us, but it does not somehow sidestep the pressing issue of whether the defendant's arguments can be answered” (Estlund, 2017, p. 370). But, to remain within the legal analogy, the point here is not one about the quality of arguments, but about whether some arguments are even admissible evidence. It may be inevitable that some inadmissible evidence may be heard, but it cannot be made to count in favor of a verdict. Something similar holds for the case of vindicatory genealogies. Suppose, for instance, that a radical realist wanted to probe the legitimation status of non-hierarchically coercive, acephalous forms of political organization—a type of structure